Saturday, May 21, 2011

Edmund de Waal, of Proust's Swann and by implication his own fourth cousin Charles Ephrussi, in The hare with the amber eyes: a family's century of art and loss (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 106.

What is god, or is not god, or what is in between?Which of mortals can say after searching?He who can see the divineleaping this way and that and back againin contradictory unexpected shifts of fortune,he it is who has got furthest towards an answer. . . .. . . I can find no certainty among men,no true report, about the gods above.

"It is strange, in New York and Philadelphia, to see the feverish enthusiasm which accompanies Americans' pursuit of prosperity and the way they are ceaselessly tormented by the vague fear that they have failed to choose the shortest route to achieve it."